Making reactions ‘go’ is a curious science. Powerpoint presenters love the idea of a catalyst – something that accelerates a reaction but can be recovered afterwards, chemically unchanged - but if anyone ever did that Chemistry experiment with the hydrogen peroxide and the liver, catalysts are not so sexy in real life.

TechLab Innovation is catalytic. We look to find parts of the business with the right mixture of ingredients (resources, business problem, realisable value/cost saving). It's a challenging pursuit but it creates good outcomes.

Today SpaceX sent a rocket into orbit. Between now and Wednesday, it will drift its way to the International Space Station where it will deliver its cargo payload as part of a resupply operation. 'Dragon' is the first time a commercial body has launched such a groundbreaking mission. The reusable SpaceX rocket booster that lofted Dragon into the heavens successfully returned to earth intact too!

Reuse sounds great. We like reuse. Reuse means less duplication. Ensuring that wheel-like objects are not invented all over DWP’s Digital landscape seems like time well-spent. O that avoiding the reinvention of many round rolling things were as simple as saying “don’t reinvent the wheel.”

I've been playing Sim City 2013 a bit recently and while irked by some of the bugs, I have enjoyed it. I've worked out how to turn a profit and then scaled that up to claim the top spot on the trading leaderboard. My city 'Plasticity' earns near four times the income of the second place.

Now if I can just work out how to scale my start-up in the same way....

I love Simcity. It's like programming, but substantially easier and more rewarding in the short-term. Maxis has produced some great versions of the game over the last 30 years, and Simcity 2013 is almost no exception. Unfortunately it's let down by the bugs.

This screenshot shows a theoretically impossible situation: two oil mines with full storage and two fuel production lines at the oil refinery in dire need of oil. This situation persisted for a Sim month. The two sites were properly connected. All local trade depots were capable of exporting all the affected resources and all were empty. This came about after I upgraded the density of the road outside the depot.

I use rsync to keep my drives backed up under Windows 7 (using Cygwin). Windows permissions were getting messed up, but the solution was to disable ACL within Cygwin. I inserted this line into /etc/fstab.